Confessions of Zeno #1000888

Ettore Schmitz was born in Trieste in 1861 from a family of German-Jewish descent, which had paradoxically Italianized itself in the great harbor city of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The future writer was bound to feel the dualism of the elements composing his intellectual and psychological background, and chose to express it by selecting for his literary work the pseudonym Italo Svevo, or Italus the Swabian. He left incompleted his studies in Germany, and returned to his native city, first to work as a bank clerk, and later on, to become a rather prosperous, even a rich, businessman. Death caught him in a car accident in 1928, a few years after the writer had tasted, too shortly, the wine of success.